It seems like everywhere you turn, someone wants you to fill out a survey! Stay in a hotel room, you get an email wanting you to fill out a quick (yeah right) survey about your visit. Use the internet? Here comes the pop-up asking for a few minutes to “help make their site better.” It seems like our Parish Church wants me to fill out a survey at least four times a year. I think the proliferation of surveys diminishes the effectiveness of the information collection. As I’m completing a survey, there’s plenty of times I end up saying to myself, “wait, was 1 or 5 strongly agree?” I can’t be the only one.
Studies also show that the people most likely to complete these surveys are the people who have had an experience that is either particularly pleasing or extremely distasteful, potentially skewing their input. As it relates to PRIER, I understand the importance of gathering this type of information, without honest input, how do we make ourselves better? How do we gather this information that is painless for PRIER and more importantly, our customer? We use a few different methods. The first is quite simple, we ask! When we have the opportunity to visit with a customer we ask 3 questions throughout the visit. 1. What is PRIER doing right? 2. Anything we can do better? 3. Is there anything you want us to do that we’re not currently doing? Admittedly, many times people are not prepared to answer these questions, but it begins a conversation that often times we get input that helps make us better. Another way we determine wants and needs of our customers is through extensive data gathering from our sales reps, website, social media sites and inbound customer calls. As a team, we study this information monthly for trends and determine what, if any, changes need to be made.
In many ways, I’m beginning to favor the methods that give me results based on actions, not necessarily words. I tend to favor Henry Ford’s approach to asking his customers what they want: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” PRIER is just at the beginning of mining our data for this type of information to help us get better. Of course, if you have any input for PRIER, just call, but don’t count on receiving that survey form from PRIER in the near future!
